Casey smiled.
"You like skydiving?" the judge asked.
"I haven't," Casey said, "but I would. If I had a parachute."
"You ever packed a chute?" the judge asked.
"No."
"You don't pack the chute just right, you end up mush. You don't just jump out of a plane unless you're really ready."
"I'm not the one who needs to be ready," Casey said, edging forward in her chair. "I think Chase is the one who's going to take a fall here."
"Really?" the judge asked, narrowing her eyes.
Casey nodded.
Judge Remy compressed her lips into a frown, took a pen from her desk, and with a flourish signed the order. She held it out, but when Casey took hold, the judge didn't let go. Casey felt the tension running like a current through the taut sheet of paper. Casey met the judge's eyes, the glint now shadowed by something dire.
"This man knows how to pack a chute," the judge said quietly. "I see the son of a bitch on FOX News about every other week talking about shutting down the borders. He'll play the sympathetic, persecuted public figure, a victim of the rabid liberal media and an ambitious glory hound. That's you. And after his opening move, he'll come after you with everything he has, every mistake you've ever made. They'll dig and they'll pry and they'll worm their way underneath your skin until they find something unpleasant and they'll bring it to the surface and spit it up for everyone to see.
"And they will see, because the whores with the cameras and the microphones will be like locusts on this one. You think Lifetime made you look like an ass? This'll be a Hollywood double feature."
The judge let go of the order and Casey nearly fell back into her chair.
"You'll be tangled in your lines with the earth coming up at you like a hammer," the judge said. "And he'll be floating to the ground."
Casey set her jaw.
"That said? I'm behind you," the judge said, then poked her chin at the order in Casey's hands. "Obviously."
CHAPTER 30
I'VE DONE A LOT OF SHIT," JOSe SAID, "BUT I NEVER DUG UP NO bodies."
"Stick with me," Casey said, trying to concentrate on the last sentence of the answer to Jordan 's slander complaint before she shut down her computer. "It's a bowl of cherries."
"Can I come?"
"What?" Casey said, looking up.
"When you dig him up?"
"I imagine when I get this Morris guy from the funeral home on the line that his first call is going to be to Gage," Casey said, e-mailing the answer to her complaint to Stacy and shutting down the machine, "so I'd like it a lot if you would."
"There goes the beginnings of a beautiful friendship, though," Jose said with a sigh. "Don't be surprised if I'm off his Christmas-card list when I show up with you and that court order.
"You don't look like you're ready for Tales from the Crypt."
"I'm not," Casey said, standing and smoothing the folds of her sundress. "The dig is for tomorrow."
"Picnic you going on?"
"Tea party."
"Oh, well, let me just shuffle on out of here then," Jose said, sidestepping toward her back door. "I was gonna cancel my meeting with the redhead's husband for you."
"I appreciate it," Casey said, closing up her computer and packing it into her briefcase.
Jose sniffed the air. "They got that plumbing going okay, I see."
"Woman's kid flushed down a toy duck," Casey said, shaking her head. "The plumber cost us more than a filing number for a federal appeal."
"That something you go on with a guy or something?" Jose asked. "Tea party, I mean."
Casey suppressed a smile. "Jose? Are you jealous?"
Jose stuffed his thick fists into the front pockets of his jeans, but did not look away. "Not one bit."
"It's a fund-raiser for the clinic at Paige Ludden's. Also, Chase's wife might be there."
Jose raised his eyebrows. "Want me to have a chat with her?"
"It's not like a barbeque," Casey said. "It's ladies, flowers, and little cucumber sandwiches."
"I could wait by her car. Kind of jump out of the bushes like a process server."
Casey shouldered her bag and hollered out to Stacy to print and file the answer to the slander complaint and that she was leaving.
Stacy appeared in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest and said, "We got a call from Isodora, collect."
"Isodora, you're kidding," Casey said. "Why didn't you get me?"
"You were the one who said not to disturb you for any reason."
"She called from Monterrey? Did she leave a number?"
"A church in a place she called Higueras. I did Google Earth. It's northeast of Monterrey. Remote. Over some mountains and down in some river valley. I asked for a number but she said it wasn't her phone and she didn't know."
"What church?"
"She didn't say," Stacy said, "she said 'the church.'"
"Christ," Casey said, "you should have gotten me."
Stacy narrowed her eyes and said, "Some of us listen to what people say."
Stacy turned and walked out.
Casey followed, stopping at the doorway, and said, "I want you to get Sharon and the two of you start calling down there. I want you to find her and figure out a way I can speak with her."
Stacy busied herself with some files, slamming open a drawer and stuffing them in with the same vigor she used to cram the trash down in an overloaded bin.
"Stacy?" Casey said. "We set on that?"
"I'll get to it," Stacy said, and turned her back.
"Great," Casey said to herself in a mutter, turning and heading for the back door only to be blocked by Jose. He took a gentle hold of her elbows.
"You want me in this with you, right? I mean, like a team?"
"Some team," she said. "You see the crap I have to put up with. She could make ten thousand more at a downtown firm, so I have to eat the attitude."
"She did do what you asked," he said quietly. "What about me?"
"What about you?" she asked.
Jose shrugged and said, "Chase's wife. You're the lawyer. I'm supposed to be the investigator."
She looked up at him, and the little nervous tic skittered across his eyelid.
She asked, "Did I ever tell you I was a prosecutor with an eighty-seven-percent conviction record? I didn't get that depending on Barney Fife and company to lock down my evidence."
"Barney Fife?" he said, aping a wince.
"Not you," she said. "Them. The Austin police. I know how to interrogate a witness, is all. Especially a cheating wife."
"Cheating wives," he said. "That I know about."
Casey furrowed her brow, wanting to apologize, but thinking that would make it even worse.
"Let's tag-team the wife," she said. "Let me see if I can work the inside and you keep the thumbscrews in your back pocket."
"What about after?" he asked.
"The wheel?"
"No. After your tea?" Jose said. "No expectations, but maybe something between us? Some kind of spontaneous distraction? A spontaneous combustion type of thing? You know, since we've got the dig tomorrow, anyway, and we'll be going down there together."
"A planned spontaneous combustion?" she asked, arching a brow. "That's arson, right?"
Jose shrugged. "I never made an arson case, so I can't help there."
"I think it is," she said, rigid and stepping around him, afraid of what she'd say if she brushed up against the muscles in his arm, wanting to, not wanting to. "Let's keep it legal. Come on."
"Of course," he said. "Please. Don't mind me."
"I don't," she said, offering a smile before she went out the door so he'd know there were no hard feelings. "Honest."
CHAPTER 31
THE CAST-IRON GATES CLANGED OPEN AND CASEY LET THE BENZ roll through between the fieldstone pillars of medieval proportions. The house, centered on a ten-acre rise in an oval hilltop of grass, dwarfed even the gates. The dome over the central body had been shipped in pieces from a Bulgarian church. That and the three-story fluted columns always made Casey think of the US Capitol building. Luddy had inherited it all from his mother's side and the house, Grace Manor, bore his grandmother's name.